‘You’d better put on your regalia for this do, I think.’
‘Oh, for …‘ Lord Cliff (on my reading) entered his thoughts again, and he cheered up a little. ‘Might as well do the thing properly while one’s about it, I suppose. Amuse yourself. Have some fruit. Back in a trice.’
There was a bunch of bananas on a table-top of an untrimmed chunk of slate, I ate a couple and told myself I was having lunch. But, in my experience, even a lunch as light as that needs washing down. I went to a likely-looking (also very nasty-looking) cupboard I had spotted on first entering the room. Apart from what might have been sticks of incense and what almost certainly were marijuana cigarettes, it contained gin, vermouth, Campari, white port, a variety of horrible drinks from the eastern Mediterranean, a siphon of soda and no glasses. I rejected the idea of mixing myself a dry Martini in a near-by ash-tray, and took a swig from the gin-bottle. Warm neat gin is nobody’s nectar, but I managed to get some down without coughing much. I chased it with soda-water, taking this perforce from the nozzle of the siphon, a different kind of feat, then swallowed a pill. As I did so, it crossed my mind that, if Underhill had been able to manufacture a hundred scarlet-and-green birds, he could certainly have manufactured one. It was true that he had produced something like my hypnagogic visions, which I had had for years, since long before moving into his house, but his version of these had been a passable copy, a counterfeit, whereas (I realized for the first time) the birds had been exact replicas of the original one I had seen in the bathroom—how like him to have tested a weapon before using it in earnest. Well, when I had had time to forget just how much the solitary bird had frightened me, there was going to be a case for going back on the bottle: the half-bottle, at least.
Time went by. There was a large book-case full of books across the room, but I left them quite alone, knowing how angry they would all make me. I had begun to contemplate pretty steadily another assault on the drinks cupboard when the Rev. Tom returned, in clerical rig-out and carrying a suit-case covered with what looked like white corduroy. He seemed in top form now, toned up by whatever had taken place while he was changing. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked me, twitching his eyebrows and shoulders. I agreed that we should.
At past three o’clock on a Sunday, the public dining-room was empty. We went in by way of the kitchen without being observed, and I at once locked the door to the hall. In quite a businesslike fashion, the rector put his suitcase on a serving-table, took out his vestments or whatever one calls them, plus some other odds and ends, accoutred himself with them and produced a book.
‘A bit of luck I happened to have this,’ he said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one’s asked to produce every day.’
‘Good. You can start as soon as you’re ready.’
‘All right. I still think this is a lot of balls, but anyway. Oh no,’ he added after finding his place in the book.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘One’s meant to have holy water for this business.’
‘Haven’t you got any?’
‘What would I be doing with a whole lot of holy water? You don’t imagine I keep it round the place like gin, do you? Wait a minute—it tells one here how to make it. You have to … Look, you don’t want me to go through all that, surely to God. It’ll take—’
‘If it says holy water, you use holy water. Get on with it. What do you have to do?’
‘Oh, hell. Okay. I’ll need some water and some salt.’
I fetched a jugful from the kitchen and poured some salt on to a plate from a cellar on one of the dining-tables.
‘Evidently one has to sort of cleanse the stuff for some reason.’ He pointed his first two fingers at the salt and read, ‘I render thee immaculate, creature of Earth, by the living God, by the holy God,’—here he made the sign of the cross— ’that thou mayest be purified of all evil influences in the name of Adonai, who is the lord of angels and of men…’
I went to the window. It occurred to me to have another look for the crucifix, which I had vainly tried to find round about dawn, but I was sufficiently sure that, having fulfilled its purpose, it had been taken back by its giver. Instead, I waited. After a minute or two a very faint voice spoke to me, so faint that it could not have been heard more than a few feet away.
‘What are you about? Would you destroy me?’
Cautiously, my eyes on the rector, I nodded my head.
‘I’ll put you in the way to acquire great riches, you shall take any woman on earth to be your paramour, you shall have all the glory war affords, or peace too, so you but cease.’
I shook my head.
‘I exorcize all influence and seeds of evil,’ read the rector. ‘I lay upon them the spell of Christ’s holy Church that they may be bound fast with chains and cast into the outer darkness, until the day of their repentance and restoration, that they trouble not the servants of God …‘
When the tiny voice returned, there was fear as well as pleading in it. ‘I shall be nothing, for I am denied repentance for ever. I shall be a senseless clod to all eternity. Can one man do this to another? Would you play God, Mr Allington? But God at least would have mercy upon one who has offended Him.’
I shook my head again, wishing I could tell him just how wrong he was on that last point.
‘I’ll teach you peace of mind.’
Now there was an offer. I turned my back on the rector and stared out of the window, biting my lips furiously. I imagined myself not noticing myself for the rest of my life, losing myself, not vainly struggling to lose myself, in poetry and sculptore and my job and other people, not womanizing, not drinking. Then I thought of the Tyler girl and the Ditchfield girl and Amy and whoever might be next: deprived of the green man, Underhill would surely devise some other way of harming the young and helpless. It was convincing, it was my clear duty; but I have often wondered since whether what made up my mind for me was not the unacceptability of the offer as such, whether we are not all so firmly attached, in all senses, to what we are that any radical change, however unarguably for the better, is bound to seem a kind of self-destruction. I shook my head.
Across the room, the rector sprinkled water on the floor and continued, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, by the token of the life poured out in the broken body and blood of Jesus Christ, and by the seven gold candlesticks, and by one like unto the Son of Man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks, and under the sign and symbol of His holy, bloodstained and triumphant cross, I exorcize thee…’
At that point I heard, no less faintly than before but with complete distinctness, a single, drawn-out, diminishing scream of abandoned terror and despair. It did not quite die away, but was cut off abruptly. I shivered.
The rector looked up. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’
‘No. Please get it over.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I’m all right,’ I said savagely. I had had enough of this query in the last few days. ‘How much more to go now?’
‘Oh, very well. There’s only another couple of sentences. Visit, O Lord, we beseech thee, this room, and drive from it all the snares of the enemy: let Thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace, and may Thy blessing be upon us evermore, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. There. I hope you’re quite satisfied?’
‘Perfectly, thank you.’ I assumed that what had just been done would have no effect on the appearances, upstairs, of the red-haired woman, and was content: I had no wish to put an end to that timid, evanescent shade. That’s it, then. I’ll run you back.’
A couple of minutes later, I was about to get into the truck beside the rector when Ramón came up to me.
‘Excuse, Mr. Allington.’
‘What is it?’
‘Mrs Allington like to see you, Mr Allington. In a house.’
‘Whereabouts? Where?’
‘Down estairs. In a office.’
‘Thank you.’
I told t
he rector I would be back in a minute. Joyce was on the office telephone. She said she had to go now and rang off.
‘Ramón told me you wanted to see me.’
‘I’m sorry, Maurice, but I’m leaving you.’
I looked at her wide, clear blue eyes, but not into them, because, turned in my direction though they were, they were not on me at all. ‘I see. Any particular reason?’
‘I just can’t go on any longer. I can’t go on trying any more. I’m fed up with trying.’
‘Trying to do what? Run your part of the house?’
‘I don’t like doing that, but I could do it if things were different, I wouldn’t mind it at all.’
‘What things?’
‘I’ve tried to love you, but you won’t let me, ever. You just have your own ideas about what to do and when and how, about everything, and they always stay the same, doesn’t matter who you’re dealing with or what they say to you. There’s no use trying to love someone when they’re always doing something else.’
‘These last few days I’ve been having a—’
‘These last few days have been exactly the same as any other few days as far as that’s concerned. More so, I mean with your father and this ghost business and everything, and now Amy, it would have been the time for anyone else but you to sort of be around.’
‘I’ve been around today, but I haven’t seen much of you.’
‘Did you try and find me?—no. And don’t say you’ve got a job to do, because everybody has. If you hadn’t got a job you’d make up things to do. I don’t know what you think about people, which is bad enough, but you certainly go on as if they’re all in the way. Except for just sex, and that’s so that you can get them out of the way for a bit. Or else you just treat them like bottles of whisky—this one’s finished, take it away, bring me another one. It’s only all right for you to do things and you to want things. How could you ask your wife to come to bed with you and your girlfriend? A little experiment, eh? Why not fix it up? Easy enough. It needed two girls and there were two girls, so fine. Why not? You might have had the decency to go to a prostitute or somebody for a thing like that.’
‘You seemed to enjoy it all right.’
‘Yes, I did, it was wonderful, but that was nothing to do with what you’d had in mind. Diana’s coming with me.’
I understood now what Jack had been talking about that morning; he had merely not been told the basic facts—predictably enough. ‘It sounds rather as if you’ve been wasting your time with me all along.’
‘I knew you’d say something like that. That’s how it would strike you: just sex. Just sex is all you know about. But it isn’t just sex with me and her. It’s not a hell of a lot to do with sex at all. It’s being with someone. Who hasn’t always got somewhere more important to be in the next two minutes. Amy won’t miss me much. I couldn’t do enough about being her mother, because you never did anything about making her be my daughter. I’m not going straight away. I’ll stay on until you’ve found someone to help housekeep. We can talk about the divorce in the meantime.’
‘Supposing I made a real effort?’
‘An effort’s no good. And you’d soon forget to make it.’
That was about that. I looked at her eyes again, and her thick yellow hair, not fine, not coarse, simply abundant, with a very slight but firm wave from broad forehead down to strong shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, Joyce.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll always come and see you. Do you think you could possibly go now?’
I went. I heard the key scrape in the lock and a smothered sob from behind the door. It was impossible to think about any of it now, except for one small part which it was impossible not to think about, for a moment at least, the part to do with experiment: ‘a little experiment, eh? Why not?’ Was I really capable of thinking—inclined to think—like that about things, and about people? If so, there might have been more to Underhill’s selection of me as his instrument than the co-presence of Amy in the house: something to do with an affinity. I hated that idea, and tried to suppress it as I walked slowly back to the truck and the rector.
That divine looked at me with more emphatic and specific petulance than usual when I joined him. ‘Nothing of any great gravity, I hope?’
I started the engine and steered out of the car-park. ‘Tom, I can’t say how much I appreciate your taking time to come along here. On a Sunday, too.’
‘What’s so special about Sunday?’
‘Well … aren’t there things like services? Sermons to prepare?’
‘You don’t imagine I’d prepare sermons for a bunch of swedes like I’ve got here, do you? You’ve got to realize the whole sermon thing has gone now, along with antimacassars and button boots.’
‘And evolution.’
‘And evolution, quite so. Anyway, I’ve got Lord Cliff preaching tonight. Not that any of that lot will … Hey, where are we going?’
I had turned uphill instead of down towards the village and the rectory. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got one more call to make.’
‘Oh no. What is it this time?’
‘Exorcism again. In a wood along here.’
‘You positively have to be joking. It’ll take—’
‘What were you saying about Lord Cliff?’
It worked: I saw the corners of his mouth turn up (for once) as he visualized whatever deeply satisfying reaction to his prolonged absence he visualized. When we got to the copse, I handed him a cut-glass vinegar bottle from my kitchen into which I had, without his knowledge, poured half a gill or so of holy water. He accepted this, kitted himself up again and started on the service with what was, for him, a good grace. I walked to and fro, looking for signs of the green man’s embodiment and subsequent disembodiment, and finding them: a fresh scar where the limb of an ash had been torn from the trunk, at a point well above arm’s reach; a scattered heap of bruised leaves from half a dozen kinds of tree and shrub. Such had been the constituents of his form here, in an English wood; he must originally have come to birth, have first been called into being, in some place where the prevailing vegetation consisted of trees with rather uniformly cylindrical trunks and boughs; so at any rate, the lineaments of the now shattered silver figure had seemed to testify. But it, and its power, had proved remarkably adaptable to a radical change of location.
It was very quiet and shady and sunny in the copse. The rector’s voice pursued its slightly irritable, perfunctory course.
‘By the emblems of the eye of the angel, the tooth of the dog, the claw of the lion and the mouth of the fish, I charge thee to depart, enemy of joy, child of perversity, and in the sign of the spirits of the black waters and the white mountain and the wilderness without end, I command thee, in the authority of Christ, to go now to the place of thy choice…’
Suddenly, ten yards off, I saw and heard a shivering among the grasses and bushes, a violent local movement of air too shapeless and multi-directional to be called a whirlwind. At first the disturbance was confined to one spot; then it seemed to spread; no, it was not spreading, it was shifting, at first almost imperceptibly, then at a slow walking pace, then faster, straight for where the rector was standing. I ran past it in a curve and pulled him out of its path. He staggered, almost slipped, steadied himself against the trunk of an oak and glared at me.
‘What the devil is the matter with you, Mr Allington? Have you gone out of your mind? I’ve had just about all I can take…’
While he continued to expostulate, I turned my back on him and saw the disturbance, still accelerating, pass over the place where he had been and out of sight behind a holly-bush. Perhaps, once launched, it was powerless to change direction; perhaps that direction had been a matter of coincidence; perhaps it had no hostile properties; but I was very glad I had acted as I did. I hurried to a position from which I could track its course. By now it had almost reached the edge of the wood.
‘Come here, quick,’ I called.
‘I’ll do no such thing.’
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Once out in the open, the phenomenon spread, became diffused, was soon a minute trembling of grass over an area the size of a tennis-court, and then was nothing. I felt the tension ebb away from my muscles, and walked back to the rector, who was still holding on to the oak tree.
‘Sorry about that. But didn’t you see it?’
‘See it? I saw nothing.’
‘Never mind. Anyway, we can pack up now.’
‘But I haven’t finished the service yet.’
‘No doubt, but it’s taken effect already.’
‘What? How do you know?’
I realized that, under the peevishness inseparable from his expressing any emotion, the Rev. Tom was frightened of me, but I could think of no explanation that would not frighten him more, and reasoned anyway that a spot of fear, from whatever source, could not fail to do him good. So I mumbled something about intuition, got him on the move and endured, first his continued protests, then his huffy silence, while we went back the way we had come. Outside the rectory, he said in a conciliatory tone,
‘You’ll give me a bit of notice about the party, won’t you?’
‘Party? Party? Have you gone out of your mind?’ was what I longed to say, ramming it home with Grand-Guignol-style bafflement, and had started on an ape-man frown before relenting, or deciding it would be more fun to have him wake up to the deception by degrees. Anyway, I said I would do as he asked, thanked him for his trouble and drove home.
In the car-park, I saw Nick’s Morris with its boot-cover lifted, and a moment later he appeared carrying two suitcases and closely followed by Lucy.
‘We’re off, Dad. Got to pick up Jo and get her to bed.’
‘Sure. Well … thank you for coming. For your support.’
Nick glanced at his wife and said, ‘Joyce told us. We’re both very sorry. But I never thought she was right for you.’
‘It’s more that I wasn’t right for her.’
‘Well, anyhow … Come up and see us as soon as you can. Get shot of this place for a bit. Give old David a taste of responsibility.’
The Green Man Page 21
